AC is the line of rising action along which the story climbs, incident by incident, to the point C; C is the turning point, the crisis, or the climax; CB is the line of falling action along which the story descends incident by incident to its logical resolution.  Nothing may be left to luck or chance.  In life the element of chance does sometimes seem to figure, but in the story it has no place.  If the ending is not the logical outcome of events, the reader feels cheated.  He does not want the situation to be too obvious, for he likes the thrill of suspense.  But he wants the hints and foreshadowings to be sincere, so that he may safely draw his conclusions from them.  This does not condemn, however, the “surprise” ending, so admirably used by O. Henry.  The reader, in this case, admits that the writer has “played fair” throughout, and that the ending which has so surprised and tickled his fancy is as logical as that he had forecast.

To aid in securing the element of suspense, the author often makes use of what Carl H. Grabo, in his The Art of the Short Story, calls the “negative” or “hostile” incident.  Incidents, as he points out, are of two kinds—­positive and negative.  The first openly help to untangle the situation; the second seem to delay the straightening out of the threads or even to make the tangle worse.  He illustrates this by the story of Cinderella.  The appearance of the fairy and her use of the magic wand are positive, or openly helpful incidents, in rescuing Cinderella from her lonely and neglected state.  But her forgetfulness of the hour and her loss of the glass slipper are negative or hostile incidents.  Nevertheless, we see how these are really blessings in disguise, since they cause the prince to seek and woo her.

The novelist may introduce many characters, because he has time and space to care for them.  Not so the short-story writer:  he must employ only one main character and a few supporting characters.  However, when the plot is the main thing, the characters need not be remarkable in any way.  Indeed, as Brander Matthews has said, the heroine may be “a woman,” the hero “a man,” not any woman or any man in particular.  Thus, in The Lady or the Tiger? the author leaves the princess without definite traits of character, because his problem is not “what this particular woman would do, but what A woman would do.”  Sometimes, after reading a story of thrilling plot, we find that we do not readily recall the appearance or the names of the characters; we recall only what happened to them.  This is true of the women of James Fenimore Cooper’s stories.  They have no substantiality, but move like veiled figures through the most exciting adventures.